Lower difficulty but commensurately lower reward

[joecascio]

It's pretty obvious now that the largest barrier to mass adoption of bitcoin is the difficulty of non-miners obtaining them. The exchanges are the choke point where governments and banks can throw up road blocks or at least speed bumps and snoop around in your business. The hardest part of buying bitcoins is getting fiat thru the purposefully slow, expensive and antiquated fiat monetary systems into the exchanges.

Has there been any discussion of possible mining reward scenarios that would democratize it more so that ordinary CPUs could still participate? In other words, make the difficulty and the reward proportionally smaller. That would allow more non-techies to start participating without going through the exchange process.

Yes, I know the same sort of effect can be accomplished with pools, but pools are power concentrators where the pool "owner" actually controls and profits more from the network hash capacity. Democratizing mining would allow people to mine without contributing to a vast pool that could endanger network stability. Aren't zillions of individual miners safer (from a 51% point of view) than large pools?

Also, what if there were a difficulty/reward algorithm that was demand sensitive?

I can't imagine these ideas haven't been discussed somewhere on here, already, so if you can link me up, I'd surely appreciate it!

JoeC

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[odolvlobo]

The difficulty is not what prevents CPU/GPU miners from earning coins. That number simply controls how often blocks are added to the block chain. The amount of competition from other miners is what really determines how much you receive from mining because all miners are competing for the same reward.

There is an alternative way of mining bitcoins with a GPU. You can also mine other coins (such as Litecoin) and then exchange those coins for bitcoins. If you want to profit from that you should start soon, because the competition in mining Litecoin is also rising quickly.